I love Christmas Day. I meet up with friends from all over the world before getting wrapped up nice and warm to go outside to throw snowballs at each other. Then we'll come back in to warm up with a big mug of hot chocolate before having a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. But then training finishes and we make our way to the hotel to be locked away for the rest of the day.

OK, so Christmas Day hasn't been what you may call "conventional" for a very long time and the solutions employed by players to compensate for the lack of time spent at home, or having a few drinks while the Queen rabbits on about the Commonwealth, can sometimes wear a bit thin. But it's our Christmas and, while we may not necessarily like it this way, it's what we're used to.

Our Christmas starts in mid-December with the wholly inappropriate but almost always memorable players' Christmas party. The planning that goes in to arranging hotels, transport, a venue, entertainment, alcohol and, occasionally, women, for 30 footballers, while also trying to get the money from each player to pay for it, shows a level of attention to detail that is not always evident on the pitch.

The first time I attended one of these Christmas parties I wasn't sure what to expect. Fortunately, I wasn't quite the youngest player there, because that would have meant holding the whip which, as I recall, was £7,000 in cash from accumulated fines for things like leaving a water bottle on the training pitch (£50), leaving an item of kit on the training ground (£50), arriving late for training (£200) or, God forbid, arriving late for a game, which has been anything from £500 to £2,000 (doubled if not paid by the next match).

At those figures, £7,000 may not sound like a lot in fine money, but a five-figure sum would have been used to hire the venue, staff and security, which equates to a lot of foreigners leaving their gloves on the training pitch (that's a fact rather than a xenophobic attack). It is certainly a lot of money for an 18-year-old kid to look after and it's a thankless task. It is essentially an evening lurching from one bollocking to another while being ruthlessly abused for either not being quick enough or messing up an order. When the whip runs out it is best to feign a life-threatening illness. Today that kid doesn't exist, which is a shame because it isn't easy watching young players having everything handed to them on a plate.

These Christmas parties can be impressive. Highlights have included a stranded Italian flight crew that ended up skinny-dipping with us in the hotel swimming pool while playing the game Marco Polo. There were more than a few fish out of water towards the end. Then there are the horrendous fancy dress parties where a player picks a letter out of an envelope and dresses as anything beginning with that letter. The last person to spot "where's Wally" in the bar after he'd gone missing had to finish their drink.

But Christmas parties will soon be a thing of the past, despite Manchester City's impressive attempts to continue flying the flag. Footballers are moving at breakneck speed towards movie star status and the value of almost any single game is, for their club, extraordinary. The potential rewards have long surpassed the risk of a night out but so far players have largely escaped any criminal involvement that might end with a prison sentence. But it is coming. There have been rape allegations, brawls and countless arrests and, of course, a cigar extinguished in a reserve team player's eye.

Much less of a headache is the youth team's Christmas play, a low-budget but highly entertaining production based on several of the first team's chief protagonists, the manager and his coaching staff. Everybody shifts their seat in readiness for the ridiculing but by the end the whole room is in fits of laughter. This year's was particularly good and, while not exactly earning any Oscar nominations, it did incorporate the chairman (usually the only exclusion), which almost certainly means no first-year pro contracts next year.

Some would say that the only downside at this time of year is that there are so many games to play. Much is made of having a winter break but the fixtures have to be played some time, and I don't see how players would be any fresher come the end of the season for two weeks off around Christmas, when, invariably, some would seize it as a chance to go on the lash.

Preparation is all-important at this time, with fitness a key component of any team's ambitions going into the Christmas run. For that reason some clubs keep the players in hotel rooms for as long as possible, even travelling from one away game straight to another and training on site. Not that this always works. I once stayed in Manchester with an office Christmas party in full swing in the hotel we were staying at. I don't think I got any sleep that night, not least because a team-mate and his leggy accomplice evicted me from my room at about 2am.

We still manage to have our own variation of Christmas, including playing some board games from yesteryear. Thanks to the iPad there is Monopoly on the bus journey, and the electronic version has been a huge hit with the team. To get further into the spirit, last year we even managed to decorate the team bus, until the noise of the baubles knocking against the windows at every bump became too much for one of the more miserable players.

Nothing, of course, can make up for the time spent away from the family and in particular the kids but thanks to Skype we can now watch them open their presents on a computer screen. It's not everybody's idea of the perfect Christmas but it's amazing what you get used to.